Jay McInerney Quotes
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There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.
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I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.
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I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.
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Great minds sink alike, right?
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Add anchovies to almost anything, in moderation, and it will taste better.
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If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.
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Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.
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He insisted on a single trade secret: that you had to survive, find some quiet, and work hard every day.
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There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.
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You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.
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I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.
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I'm afraid that - not necessarily deliberately, but consistently - I've made a kind of laboratory out of my life, where I mix the stuff in the test tubes to create explosions - possibly resulting in interesting by-products. I mean, not deliberately - I'd be crazy to deliberately do that - or maybe not.
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Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume.
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If being a spokesman for a generation is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it.
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I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.
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I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.
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Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.
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I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
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I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.
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Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.
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I don't think I've left a trail of weeping women in my wake. I mean, the number of serious relationships I've had has not been into double digits.
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The only sensible approach is not to take it too seriously. What counts is the writing.
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I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices . . . The point is not to be debilitated by your pleasures. Maybe I have lucky genes or something but I've never been truly addicted to anything, except pleasure in general.
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There aren't many shy writers left.
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Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."
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Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.
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What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.
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Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)
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I realized that I might not ever make it as a writer, that it might be because I wasn't good enough, or that it might be because the odds were just too long.
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"Socialist" is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
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